Thursday, July 21, 2016

Life after death? Part 1

In
listening to parishioners, I've learned that life after death can appeal in
several ways. Some persons enjoy this life but also hope for even greater
enjoyment in an unlimited future of life after death. Conversely, some persons
experience so much exploitation, pain, suffering, or deprivation in this life
that the possibility of a new life without pain, suffering, tears, or death
appeals greatly. Of course, the abuse of this appeal prompted Marx, among
others, to characterize religion as the opiate of the masses. More broadly, many
persons believe that this life rarely, if ever, provides justice for both the
righteous and the wicked, a justice that seems achievable only after death. Finally,
if God's love for people is as great as many persons believe, then God's infinite
love can never find fulfillment in finitude but only in eternity.

Regardless
of life after death's appeal, some of its traditional attributes now seem
dissatisfying to people to whom I have ministered. Illustratively, change appears
essential for anything to remain continually interesting, enjoyable, or
beautiful. The prospect of heavenly eternal stasis – an unending, unchanging perfection
– feels more like eternal punishment (hell) than a blessing (heaven). Jokes
about individuals preferring to party in hell instead of eternally strumming heavenly
harps are funny largely because of our aversion to stasis.

Moreover,
historic Christian understandings of what happens when a person dies, views
that usually presume an empty tomb and Jesus' bodily resurrection, are increasingly
anachronistic in view of advances in astronomy, particle physics, and biology.

Astronomers,
after losing their initial clashes with Christianity, have triumphed over
Christian efforts to cling to literal interpretations of the Bible's
three-tiered cosmology (heaven, earth, and hell). Heaven and hell, if they
exist, are almost assuredly not actual physical places.

Particle
physicists and biologists have shown that the human body, which is comprised of
trillions of atoms, constantly exchanges substantial numbers of atoms with the
environment by ingesting air, water, and nutrients and then egesting various wastes.
This occurs not only in obvious ways (e.g., respiration and digestion) but also
in less obvious ways (e.g., atoms entering and exiting the body through the
skin).

Consequently,
life after deathdoes not, and physically cannot, denote a literal
continuation or resumption of a person's bodily existence. Numerous atoms in
each person's body have previously been part of other individuals' bodies. Intriguingly,
scientists estimate that every person now alive probably has one or more
atoms that had been, at least temporarily, part of Jesus' body. Literal continuation or resumption of a
person's bodily existence would thus entail multiple people simultaneously
sharing an atom. Replication of atoms might allow an apparent continuation or
resumption of bodily existence but would in fact be at best a copy of the
original and not the original itself.

Additionally, if life after death denotes a
continuation of physical existence, then many people would fare poorly, stuck
with bodies that most of us would strongly prefer not to have. Many elderly,
mentally retarded, physically handicapped, and severely diseased persons of my
acquaintance would consider themselves accursed if life after death denotes
continuation of one's physical existence.

Simplistic suggestions that transitioning to
life after death eliminates all disease, handicaps, and other physical
limitations/deterioration are overly facile, ignoring the indissoluble physical
oneness of human existence. I am who I am partially because of disease,
handicaps, and bodily deterioration. Changing any of those, even for the
better, would profoundly alter, with no guarantees of improving, the person who
I am. That is, my body might be physically perfect but my mental processes,
emotions, and personality (all aspects of physical existence) might suffer
significant impairment caused by narcissism, a sense of invulnerability, etc.

In sum, the image of an empty tomb may be a
powerful metaphor but offers little substantive insight, given the advances in
science, into the possibility or nature of life after death. Platitudinous
affirmations of physical resurrection and life after death endlessly repeated
in Eastertide, at funerals, and on other occasions, partially explain why growing
numbers of educated reject traditional Christianity.

Theories
about life after death that spiritualize resurrection superficially appear to
rest on firmer foundations. Gospel accounts of the resurrected Jesus are clearly
paradoxical and point to a mysterious, qualitatively new form of existence. For
example, the risen Jesus suddenly appears in a locked room yet is sufficiently
corporeal to eat a meal and for the disciples to touch him. The New Testament
epistles enticingly refer to the human body as a seed that must die so that God
can give it a new body and of the need for mortality to put on immortality.

Spiritualizing
life after death, however, poses its own set of difficulties. Among the least
of these is describing a credible twenty-first century cosmology that includes
a spiritual (as opposed to physical) heaven and, depending upon one's theology,
hell. Imagining a spiritualized heaven is arguably little more difficult or
problematic than imagining the multiple parallel universes that some scientists
hypothesize exist.

However,
spiritualizing life after death raises two questions unanswered in spite of centuries
of discourse. First, what is the nexus between the spiritual and the physical?
That is, how does the immaterial spiritual interface with the material,
physical world? No explanation of that interface has gained widespread traction
among scientists and theologians. In the absence of such an interface, how can
humans, whose senses and cognitive processes are all physical, think, speak, or
otherwise describe, much less interact with, the spiritual? This dilemma is
relevant to all forms of revelation, from mysticism to the inspiration of
scripture.

Second,
what does it mean to describe humans as spiritual? If human spirituality
connotes that humans have an ethereal, eternal aspect, then what is the origin
of that spiritual aspect? Postulating that God created through evolution, is
the spirit a latent, barely developed aspect of non-human lifeforms that only
becomes fully developed in humans? If so, what was the catalyst for that
development? Since evolution appears to proceed through random events and
natural selection, is it reasonable to believe that God somehow knew that
spirit's more fully developed emergence would coincide with the evolution of
humans? Even if one can explain the evolutionary development of an ethereal,
immaterial spirit, the conundrum of describing the nexus between the physical
and the spiritual remains unsolved.

Conversely,
if human spirituality does not connote an ethereal, eternal aspect of human
existence, then what does stating that humans are spiritual beings mean? The
second part of this essay, which will appear next Thursday, begins with my answer to that question, explores a
contemporary concept of life after death that I find attractive, and then
examines how diminished confidence in life after death has affected individuals
and altered the Church and its ministry.